Oracle DBA Pocket Guide: Quick Reference for Database Administration

Not all of the pocket guides work, but this one does. This topic is just right for this style of book. This a quick reference to all of the syntax that you need for DBA work on a daily basis. Definitely worth the money if administration of Oracle installations is your job.

It's just a pocket guide. It's a good list of things to consider, but no real hidden gems. The same information can be assembled from Oracle's very good documentation.

I bought this book hoping for a pithy, comprehensive, quick-reference guide to Oracle DBA commands and syntax. If you've ever used Rob Verschoor's superb Sybase DBA guides you'll know what I mean.Instead it's a rather odd collection of general paragraphs giving high-level overviews of a limited range of topics (many of which ought to be covered in more detail and in a larger book), coupled with other sections covering strange subsets of syntax, by no means completely, which are seemingly chosen and presented at random. There ARE some nice bits if you dig through it BUT if you're looking for that one book you'll carry everywhere, refer to everyday and eventually falls apart with overuse (like your usual O'Reilly book...) you may be very disappointed. I'm sorry to say I've found Google and Oracle's own documentation to be much more useful for day-to-day DBA work and can only hope Mr. Verschoor starts writing Oracle books sometime soon... This one sits on my shelf gathering dust.

I bought this book on a whim at a bookstore because it claimed to include "quick reference" info on performance. I found that area seriously lacking...I thought it odd to have sections on installation and planning in here. Hopefully one does not make such decisions with only a pocket guide as a reference. That section could be shortened to a few pages of warnings and a few URLs. The backup and recovery section was great, but it could be shortened up about 5 pages. Same for the security section.With the extra space, I would put in at least 15 pages on performance tuning.The data dictionary quick reference is very useful, and if it weren't for that I would probably have given this book away.